Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, I am fascinated by that recent comment, that there might be something in the Leader of the Opposition's past that, if he gets a security clearance, gets to see it and is required to not speak about it, will somehow become public. I do not see how that works. This is a terrible secret that is known to the Prime Minister, something that is a scandal, something that is terrible. The Pr…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, my petition is also on the subject of Falun Gong or Falun Dafa, a peaceful practice that emphasizes truth, compassion and forbearance and that is centred on Chinese traditional practices. Its practitioners have been persecuted for, frankly, no good reason by the Chinese government since 1999. The petitioners request that Canada take a strong stance against the persecution, and in part…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, that is one heck of a misrepresentation of what I got up and said six months ago. I said that 97% of the money was going elsewhere in Ontario, a fact which is not disproved by telling me that there is funding that has gone to Kelowna, British Columbia, or to Calgary, Alberta. I just want to observe that if the minister's letters to me soliciting my feedback are to be taken seriously…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I am returning to the subject of a question that I first raised in this place on June 14. That was a while ago, so I am going to read what I wrote at the time. I said: Madam Speaker, I will ask the housing minister something this time. Carleton Place, in my riding, has been Canada's fastest-growing municipality for the past four years. When the town was given zero dollars from the h…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, in his earlier comments, the member for Timmins—James Bay used the term “total falsehood”, which I think may be unparliamentary. I am not certain of that, but if it is, it would be a good idea for him to withdraw it.
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, on a point of order, the hon. member referred to an hon. colleague by their personal name as opposed to the name of their riding, which we do not do here.
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, last weekend, it was reported that David Lavery from Perth, Ontario, had been detained by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Mr. Lavery is the hero known as “Canadian Dave” who rescued hundreds during the fall of Kabul. After all other Canadian officials had already been evacuated, Canadian Dave and his team stayed on in Kabul to ensure the safe passage of Canadians and others on the final f…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, on November 8, I raised a question regarding newly unredacted briefing notes. To be fair, they are still only partially unredacted. There is plenty still hidden, but they are less redacted than previously. They are notes provided by Correctional Service Canada officials to the minister from 2015 to 2019. They were originally sought in 2019. The government managed to delay their rele…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, the hon. member talked about the success of CORCAN programs. Well, then, if she thinks they are so great, she should listen to what CORCAN said in the briefing note that the government kept hidden for five years: Based on the empirical evidence accumulated by CSC, Public Safety, and international research, prison industrial farming, even if accommodated to include elements of “pet t…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I believe the allegation by the member, what he characterizes as borderline contempt of Parliament, is itself unparliamentary. I would ask him to withdraw it. It is the second time he has done this. Doing it twice when it is wrong does not make it right.
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I have no idea, but it strikes me that the member's statement that the Leader of the Opposition is in borderline contempt is an attempt to say something through the back door that cannot be said through the front door. I hope the member would withdraw that. While he is at it, his factually incorrect statement about Stephen Harper being held in contempt sh…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Madam Speaker, it is coming from the documents that were withheld from all of us for six years. On October 15, Corrections Canada closed the bidding in what it characterized as an “invitation to submit an expression of interest...to operate a commercial activity from a building(s) located at Joyceville Institution...and provide offender employment and vocational training.” I think this refers to t…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Madam Speaker, the Information Commissioner has forced the public safety minister to release previously redacted briefing notes from 2018 that reveal Corrections Canada recommended against opening the Kingston prison farms because they would not enhance the likelihood of post-incarceration employment, not reduce recidivism, cost millions of dollars to operate and make public safety results worse. …
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, I think I have the numbers right, 93 Conservative members of Parliament. I am not sure how this is costing money. We are not paid by the word here. We are not the authors of potboilers. I can only observe that if this is how things work, if it is the case that time that is wasted in the House of Commons is the public's money being squandered, then surely the member opposite, who has t…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, this debate has been going on for some time. We have gone through the original motion and an amendment and now we are dealing with a subamendment to the motion. It all refers back to a previous motion, which was adopted on June 10 in the House of Commons, so I thought it might be helpful to go back and review the wording of those motions to make sure that we all know what is being dis…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, I likewise very much enjoy my colleague's interventions. I enjoy them much more than the ones from the member for Winnipeg North, if we are being honest about things, although I do not get to enjoy them as frequently. I want to say with regard to this that I was intimately involved in the procedure and House affairs hearings in 2011 into the purported contempt of Parliament of the the…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, my colleague is quite right. We could, and probably should, go to an election. The House of Commons has a kind of tenuous confidence in the government right now, so it would seem. It should be understood that “confidence”, used in the parliamentary sense, does not mean robust confidence; it means unwillingness to trigger an election. Certainly, in this party, we are willing to go to a…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, there are really two ways of slicing this. The implication is that these conflicts were reported to the ministers, and the ministers saw them and decided not to act, which is itself obviously outrageous. The other possibility, which is entirely possible, remembering always the dictum that one ought never to ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, and looking at …
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, thank you for getting my riding name right time after time. It is an impressive feat and I appreciate it. There was a sort of drive-by smear comment from the member for Kingston and the Islands a bit earlier, in his questions and comments. He essentially asserted that the government is passing the legislation in order to protect people like my hon. colleague here. I just happen to not…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I, too, am rising to present a petition regarding Falun Gong and the organ harvesting issue. I was the chair of the parliamentary committee that heard compelling testimony about this heinous practice. The petitioners call for Canada to adopt legislation to stop forced organ harvesting and publicly call for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong, a peaceful movement that embodies the …
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I hope the parliamentary secretary will understand my point when I note that one of the numbers he cited makes the whole point here: 68 inmates have completed Red Seal certificates since 2021. That is in three years. That is 22 or 23 per year, which is not much in a country with thousands of inmates. It points to the problem that the reports I was citing get at. Our programs are vas…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I am rising today to follow up on a question from June 17. Admittedly, it was a very long time ago, but the nature of the world of adjournment proceeding questions is that sometimes they follow considerably after the original question was asked. An unhappy coincidence is that none of the issues that were raised on June 17 have been resolved. This relates to training in federal penal…
Read full speech →Concurrence in Committee Reports
Madam Speaker, my question to the member is about the pattern this report finds, which is so similar to a pattern we see repeated over and over again under the government. We could look at the promise to plant two billion trees, with results that are wildly at variance and much lower, as a representative example. We expect governments to be imprecise, I suppose, and inefficient compared to the pri…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, is the parliamentary secretary denying that members of the panel sold cattle to the prison farm program, which is an obvious conflict of interest?
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, my intervention is about corrections but I have to correct something that the hon. member just said a second ago, that our emissions were down 8%. Our emissions were up several thousand per cent last year, 2023, because our forests were on fire. We became the world's third largest emitter. The lousy forestry practices of the government are a substantial contributor to that ecologica…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, that is a good question. Those foundations are a sort of quasi-government creature. They also exist in the United Kingdom in the form of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations. The United Kingdom was experiencing the same problems we have here. I think that the changes that were made in the U.K. to improve the issues with quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations coul…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, first of all, happy birthday to Henry. Since we are on that trend, on October 10, it will be my brother's birthday, so happy anticipated birthday to Blake. As usual, he will be getting a book on flying for his birthday gift. My brother is a pilot; in fact, he flew over Parliament Hill as the lead aircraft in the July 1 Canada Day celebrations in a 1928 De Havilland DH.60. I have no …
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, I think that two issues are being conflated here. The separation of the executive, judiciary and legislative functions is less formalized here than it is under the United States Constitution. People often regard these as being much more systematic silos here than they actually are. What I think is really going on here, to the extent that it is legitimate, is an issue of what we woul…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, there are several different things to unpack in that question. I know the next speaker is going to be this very same member; she knows a great deal about this topic. I hope that, if she does not mind veering away from the prepared text she had, she will share her thoughts on the subject. With regard to the issue of methane gas, in general, I heartily agree with her that trapped meth…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, just to refresh the House, this debate has been going on for a couple of days now, and it might be helpful to return to Mr. Berthold's amendment, which we are debating today. The motion is: That the government's failure of fully providing documents, as ordered by the House on June 10, 2024, be hereby referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. The amendment re…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, when Canadians have problems with their CRA My Account online, they have no choice but to contact the ministry by telephone. Here is what typically happens: When they call the CRA's toll-free number, more often than not, they are greeted by a recorded message telling them the line is full and to try again later. When they do get through, they are frequently put on hold for as long as …
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, that is why I filled out a late show form in advance. To provide advice on how best to reopen the prison farm at Joyceville, near Kingston, the Correctional Service of Canada appointed a prison farm advisory panel. The panel's advice was to add a cow dairy program. One result of this advice has been the purchase of cattle from members of the very same advisory panel. Another result ha…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I think the member is mistaken with the list of cuts she gave. My party, under our current leadership and under, hopefully, some of our other leaders in the past, has demonstrated a concern for making sure we do not spend money we do not have. We do not promise to spend on programs we cannot actually finance. We also do not engage in wishful thinking, as the Liberals do, which will …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, first, I will deal with the assertion that the Prime Minister has never tried to avoid facing the House on this issue. On March 24, 2020, hoping that we would be in a panic, the government tried to get unanimous consent to push through a provision. This would have given it the power to avoid facing a confidence vote in the House for a little over year and a half. When the opposition…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, four and a half years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a worldwide pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic. Two days after that, the House of Commons suspended. About ten days after that, on March 24, it came back in an emergency session with the government's goal of passing a piece of legislation, which at that point had not been shared with the House of Commo…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, I think that was more of a comment than a question.
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the Canada Summer Jobs program: (a) what is the formula used to calculate the youth unemployment rate for each riding in Canada; (b) from what sources is the data used to calculate the youth unemployment rate obtained; (c) what method is used to apply census data on youth unemployment from the municipal level to arrive at useful youth unemployment data by federal electoral district;…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the National Strategy for Drugs for Rare Diseases: (a) since January 1, 2023, including announced commitments by all departments and agencies, what is the dollar amount that has been provided to, or committed for the purpose of provision to, the provinces and territories, through the National Strategy for Drugs for Rare Diseases, broken down by purpose; (b) for which drugs, therapie…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to training and employment programs for offenders in federal penitentiaries: (a) does Correctional Service Canada (CSC) currently offer registration and training in any provincial or territorial apprenticeship programs and, if so, which programs and in which institutions; (b) are there provincial or territorial apprenticeship programs in which CSC has previously offered registration an…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to Health Canada’s (HC) Priority Review of Drug Submissions policy (hereinafter the policy): (a) since December 1996, how many submissions have been made under the policy, broken down by year; (b) since December 1996, how many submissions have been approved under the policy, broken down by year; (c) since March 2006, how many submissions have been made under the policy, broken down by …
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Madam Speaker, I will ask the housing minister something this time. Carleton Place, in my riding, has been Canada's fastest-growing municipality for the past four years. When the town was given zero dollars from the housing accelerator fund, I wondered why. It turns out there is a pattern here. Of the $1.5 billion awarded to Ontario under the fund, 97% went to cities and towns in which Liberals ho…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Madam Speaker, Health Canada's priority review program exists to allow the expedited review of new, potentially life-saving, therapies. Qualifying drug submissions are able to seek approval for therapeutic use in advance of other, less urgent therapies. Health Canada's posted time frame for this expedited process is a target of 180 calendar days. How often is Health Canada meeting this target? How…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, on May 31, I asked the following question: ...with respect to the dairy barn at the Joyceville correctional institution that is scheduled to open in July, number one, what was the original budgeted cost? Number two, what is the actual cost? Number three, has dairy quota been made available by Dairy Farmers of Ontario? If so, what are the contract details and how much will that cost? F…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, one of the questions I asked was whether the minister can confirm where the quota is coming from, how much it will cost and what it will be used for. I would like an answer to that question.
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Mr. Speaker, I request a recorded division.
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Mr. Speaker, in my opening remarks I observed that the purpose of Motion No. 109 was “to ensure that no future government would be able to amend the Standing Orders without the consent of all recognized parties.” The mechanism laid out in the motion and the proposed additions to the standing order that are contained in the motion is to ensure that debate would continue as long as there is a meanin…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, Corrections Canada has a mandate to retrain Canada's 10,000 inmates so they can find employment upon release. In the past three years, Corrections has issued 112,000 meaningless in-house vocational certificates and a grand total of 64 Red Seal certifications. Corrections has also made zero effort to engage in provincial apprenticeship programs, which could produce life-changing certif…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, last Friday I had the opportunity to sit in the Speaker's chair for an hour. I had no idea until that moment how hard it is to remember the names of people's ridings, so you have my empathy. I appreciate what the parliamentary secretary said in his response. It sounds like the November deadline, which I speculated and hoped would be achieved, is likely to be achieved. I am hoping th…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, on May 24, I raised the following question, which I will repeat verbatim for the purpose of context: ...pulmonary arterial hypertension, also known as PAH, is a disease that blocks arteries in the lungs, causing high blood pressure in the lungs and damaging heart tissue. Patients diagnosed with PAH have, on average, three years to live. In the [U.S.], a drug called sotatercept was r…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the member for Timmins—James Bay is himself out of order when he raises these irrelevant points about the lyrics, when the sole purpose of this is to interrupt the remarks of others. It is shameful. He ought to apologize to the House for his consistently shameful behaviour.
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